Time and Space Project

Slaughterhouse Five and Flatland

Stage 1 Project Description

For stage 1 of the Time and Space project, I read different books in math and humanities that addressed different content that would help me further on in the project. The book I read in humanities was Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut. This book mainly focused on one character named Billy Pilgrim who was considered crazy by his family due to the fact that he believed he was traveling through time. The purpose of reading this book was to think in depth about what time actually is, and the different ways you can perceive it. Throughout the story Billy experiences events from the past and meets these "Tralfamadorians" that have different concepts of space and time than humans. They don't believe that someone dies, but that they are just at a different point in time. Through Billy's experiences with the Tralfamadorians and his time traveling, his views on the world become completely different from what they were before. The book we read in Math was Flatland by Edwin Abbot. This book is about a completely two dimensional world that is populated by lines and shapes. All women are straight lines, and then men can have any number of sides as long as the sides are regular. The population of Flatland is led by so called circles, which are really just shapes that have the appearance of a circle, although they are actually made up of hundreds or even thousands of sides. These two books provided background knowledge that is imperative for the next stage of our project, and offered unique opinions on relevant topics. Throughout the process of reading Slaughterhouse Five my class participated in seminars and wrote journal entries to have a deeper understanding of the text. When we were reading Flatland, we tried to imagine exactly what a two dimensional world looked like by drawing examples of what we thought houses and various other elements of Flatland looked like, and then spent some time learning about geometric tools and figures so we could have a better understanding of the text. The geometry content we learned was mostly taught by having us draw constructions with protractors and compasses, we had a constructions packet to complete so we understood all the different angles and line you could draw with these tools. After reading both of these books, we started an art piece that had to express a theme from one or both of the books, and be created by just using geometric constructions. This art piece allowed us to take all the content we had learned and represent it in a final product.

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Artist Statement - My art piece consists of five shapes all with varying amounts of sides with circles that correspond to the amount of sides that each shape has. The background is covered with white triangles to represent the fact the color does not exist in Flatland due to a war that was centered around color. The main goal of my art piece is to represent the social structure of Flatland. Flatland is a 2 dimensional world, and the more sides a shape has, the higher up in the social structure the shape is. I am including an isosceles triangle, which is at the very bottom of the social pyramid, and then have four other shapes that eventually reach seven sides. These four shapes are a square, a pentagon, a hexagon, and a heptagon. The circles included in each shape represent how close each shape is to becoming a circle. For example the triangle only has three circles, and when they’re combined, they look nothing like a circle. When I drew seven circles for the heptagon, it looks more like a circle, showing that it’s closer to the ideal shape of Flatland, which is to have as many sides as possible. The “leaders” of Flatland are led by so called circles, which are really just shapes that have the appearance of a circle, although they are really made up of hundreds or even thousands of sides. Technically the shapes that are on my art piece are not truly 2 dimensional as they would be in the book, but I wanted to add gold paint to the edges of the shapes to the make them stand out. I chose to only include five shapes, because the circles I drew on the shapes create a flower when there are seven sides, therefore I last shape I included was a heptagon. Overall, the goal of this art piece is to understandably represent the “social pyramid” of Flatland, and how it can be captured through art.

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Project Reflection

I found the two books we read fairly challenging, due to the subject matter, and both of the author's writing styles. Slaughterhouse Five was hard to understand at first, which caused me to lose interest in reading the book and persevering in trying to understand what the author was trying to get across. Although I lost interest when I first started reading, the book became more compelling as I read because of new events and characters that were introduced. The different themes that were brought up throughout the book were very unique, and caused me to have a different mindset of topics like time. Before this project, I had never read anything like the book Flatland before, and was very confused through most of it, but was able to get basic concepts out of it. The author's writing style was hard to understand, and the ideas he was trying to get across were very abstract. When I learned we were reading a book in math class, I thought it was pointless and that we should be going over content instead, but as we got further into the book I learned important concepts, just in a different way than I'm used to. One main theme that really interested me in Flatland, was the society, and how it was similar to ours. Social status is almost completely depend on appearance, just like it is here. The way this was expressed in math was fascinating, and definitely helped me become interested in the story. After I finished both of these texts, I didn't think there could possibly be any connections between the books seeing as they are so different. Then I realized that I might not be able to connect a theme, but specific events. So one connection I came up with was the tralfamadorians and their perception of dimensionality, and how that can connect to the multidimensionality that is gone over in the Flatland. This realization allowed me to think about dimensions in a different way and how they can connect to concepts.

I went through many ideas for my art piece, and didn't have a finalized idea until the week before it was due. I really struggled coming up with a unique idea that would interest me and that I could be proud of, so I went through many possible ideas before I settled on one. One of my first ideas was to create a plexiglass sculpture and express the motif of mustard gas and roses through painting it, but I wouldn't have enough time to complete it to the best of my abilities so I discarded it. After a couple days of trying to come up with an idea I decided on representing the social status of Flatland through shapes. The more sides a shape has in Flatland, the higher in the social pyramid they are, so I included an isosceles triangle up to a heptagon. I then included the number of circles that corresponded to the amount of sides a shape had. So for example a 5-sided shape (pentagon) would have five circles. One realization that I had when creating this art piece was how much a heptagon looked like a circle compared to a pentagon. For someone reason I hadn't been able to quite conceptualize how fast a shape could begin to look like a circle. Overall, I think my final art piece is a good representation of what I learned in Flatland, I believe that I could have worked harder to include Slaughterhouse Five to express everything I've learned over the past few months.

My art piece only addressed Flatland, but I think that through the process of coming up with an idea my thinking evolved in both Flatland and Slaughterhouse Five. Writing an essay is one thing, but when you're asked to create an art piece inspired by a book, you think about all the elements and themes the author included in a completely different way. Although I didn't realize anything new about the books, the themes that were incorporated into the story have more meaning than they did before. I think this art piece will be very beneficial when it comes to planning and carrying out my final art piece, because I ran into multiple issues, and now can prepare for issues that might occur in future projects. I need to be able to identify all possible problems before they occur, and create a solid idea before I start anything. The main difficulty I had with this art piece was not having enough time to do what I wanted to do. I'm excited to plan my final art piece, because I will have more time to collect materials and create something very unique and engaging. This art piece allowed me to move forward feeling more confident when thinking about future projects, and the different ideas that I can turn into a final product.

Stages 2 and 3: Shattered - A Narrative Art Exhibit

Our final exhibition was centered around creating something that resembled the famous art installation Meow Wolf. To start the second phase of the project, our entire class went to visit Meow Wolf so that we could brainstorm and get inspiration from what we saw there. Once we returned to the school we came up with a plot for our exhibition, and from there split into teams that would address various aspects of the project that needed to be completed.

Our exhibition was based on the life and beliefs of a mathematician named Markus Lynch. The exhibit contained three rooms, the first room was Lynch’s office. This room gave everyone who entered the exhibit background information on who this man was, and his relationship with his daughter, which was a key part of the plot. In this room there were clues that helped all participants understand the exhibit better. From this room you would enter a second room that showed a car crash that Markus Lynch got in, this room had audio and visual clues that showed people how the crash occurred, and what may have happened to the main character. From the second room, you enter the final room, which contained many paintings that suggested certain things about the fate of Markus Lynch, and if he ended up surviving or stuck in a coma. We designed the exhibition so that each participant could get different things out of the exhibit, and come up with their own idea as to what happened to Markus Lynch.

When we started this project I was on the storyboarding team, and helped finalize all plot details and help other teams identify what they needed to do to get started. Throughout the entire project I jumped between many different groups, but spent most of my time with the outreach, artist, and storyboarding teams. Storyboarders were in charge of the first room and all of the letters/essays that would be on Markus Lynch’s desk. I helped with this by identifying and annotating articles that connected to content we had learned about in class. The main job of the outreach team was to raise money, so I helped set up and run bake sales. For the artist team I helped mostly in the second room, finalizing props, and taking the lead on painting an ambulance across two walls.

The field trip we took to Meow Wolf was incredibly helpful in terms of building ideas for our final exhibition. The many creative art installations present at Meow Wolf gave me multiple ideas on how we can transform the space available to us into an interactive exhibit that can represent our learning from the semester. The story and plot that Meow Wolf is based on helped give me a sense of how to tell a story through a combination of art and writing. Experiencing Meow Wolf first hand helped everyone envision how we could build an exhibition that would engage the public, and make people think about out of the box ideas like “how do we know what we know?”

The last month of this project was very all over the place for me. I started in the storyboarding team which was busy at the beginning, but we then quickly ran out of things to do. Due to this I helped out multiple groups and jumped in wherever I was needed. To complete this project collaboration was incredibly important, and I think that I have definitely gained new skills in terms of group work. Every single part of the exhibition was completely by a group of people, not just one person. As a class I think we have become much more productive communicators, and have learned how to effectively work with each other. On a personal level, I think that the most important skill that I’ve grown in from this project was communication. Nothing would have been accomplished if there wasn’t effective communication, so this forced me to make sure that I was understood, and that I was understanding others.

Overall, I was very proud of the project when we finally finished it, and I do believe that I put my best work into it. I worked on multiple sections of the exhibit, and know that I did my best because everything that I was a part of ended up getting finished and was able to be presented. Although some of the work I did in this exhibition wasn’t the best I’ve ever done, I still think I did the best I could under the time constrictions that we had. I came in on the weekend, and before school to finalize details so I could present work that I could be proud of. All though this project went fairly well, in the future I need to work on handling stress better. I think I could have done better work if I wasn’t so worried about getting everything finished on time. So if were to do this project again, I would organize everything I had to get done so that I wouldn’t be overwhelmed at the end of the project.

This was the biggest and most ambitious project I have ever done at Animas, and it was definitely the best. It was nearly completely student led, which brought our entire class closer, allowing people to take leadership positions and share unique perspectives that made our exhibit more interesting. The math content we learned that was most utilized in this project was learning about fractals, because they were everywhere in our exhibit. Philosophy was also a key part of our exhibition, the entire project was centered around the question “how do we know what we know?” My view of project based learning has shifted after this project, after having accomplished an exhibit like we did, I have higher expectations for project that I do individually and in group work. I now feel capable of taking on ambitious projects that will tie in personal interests and content learned in school.

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